Saving Web Sites

Downloading files from Web sites is something most people who browse the Internet are familiar with. But what about downloading the Web sites themselves? Firefox allows you to save a copy of any Web site to your computer, like a digital snapshot of the site as it exists at that time. This provides peace of mind that you'll always have a copy of the page even if it disappears from the Internet — for example, if you write an online newspaper article that will stay up only for two weeks and you want to keep a copy of it. It also comes in handy when you want to save a copy of a long document to read on a plane or in other offline environments.

1. Visit the Web site you want to save.

2. Press Ctrl+S (or +S on a Mac) to open the Save window more quickly.

3. Select the location to which you would like to save the file.

   You can also provide a new filename if you don't like the default, which is provided by the Web site.

4. From the Save as Type drop-down list at the bottom, select one of the following options:

   • Web Page, Complete: Instructs Firefox to save the entire Web site, including all images, colors, and designs. This option is the default, and it's the best option if you want Firefox to save an exact replica of the page to your computer.

     Firefox saves the main Web page file to the directory of your choosing and places all subsidiary files to a new directory called WebPageName_Files. For example, suppose you choose to save the CNN home page to a file called CNN.html in your computer's My Documents folder. Firefox would save CNN.html to My Documents as instructed and create a new subfolder called CNN_Files to hold images and other files associated with the Web site. You don't have to worry about reconstructing the page in the future; when you load CNN.html in Firefox, Firefox automatically does that work for you.

   • Web Page, HTML Only: Instructs Firefox to save the Web site itself, but not the images and other associated media. If you're online when you view your saved copy later on, the media may or may not be available depending on the way the Web site is programmed. If you're offline, however, the media is unavailable because you haven't saved it to your computer.

   • Text Files: Instructs Firefox to save only the plain text of the Web site. No images or other multimedia will be included, and any text styling (for example, bold or italic) will be lost.

After you save the page, the Download Manager appears. To view your snapshot of the page, simply double-click it in the Download Manager. If you're comfortable with your computer's file system, you can also navigate to the folder where you saved the snapshot and open the file (which probably has an .htm or .html extension) in Firefox.